Secure deletion of content is a business requirement today in the context of defensible disposal. Defensible disposal of business records is a business process where a business entity can prove (in court) that it expunged certain records while meeting its legal obligations (records management). If the records were not truly expunged (securely deleted) the court could order the retrieval of these records through forensic methods.
Numerous known solutions provide for secure data deletion based on physically destructing storage devices or overwriting magnetic disk drives with patterns. However, these methods may not be used in modern storage technologies. For example, deleting flash memory by overwriting will not work when wear leveling is applied to enhance the storage mediums lifetime. This is because wear leveling will have the effect that an overwriting operation will not affect the existing data intended to be deleted but rather will cause the writing to a new block. To address this problem, solid state devices (SSD) sometimes provide firmware commands for secure deletion of an entire hard drive. However, such deletion will only work on one entire physical disk and not on the file/object level. As another example, overwriting of content on a file system or blocks on a storage device will not work in modern storage infrastructure due to intelligent caching, archiving and/or virtualization.
Consequently, there is an unchanged need for improvements in solutions for data accessibility lifetime management and secure data deletion.